D.Tube 0.6: Pushing it to the limit

So many things done, so many things to talk about again in this blog article for DTube...

First, I haven't blogged about it but a lot of people noticed that the @dtube account now has 1M SP delegated from @ned. This is helping us tremendously to gather funds for the project development and infrastructure. As collateral damage, our uploads have more than quadrupled in the last month since 0.5, we are nearing 1 video per minute.

A lot of people keep messaging me asking me why @dtube upvotes or not, if it is a bot or not. It is not a bot, we actually try to watch as many videos as possible, and if we like it we upvote! It is very possible that some good videos get missed, it is getting difficult to look at everything right now.

More encoding power

I said in the previous article that I was expecting the uploading server to be enough power not to have any queues. Well I was wrong, it seems we have been hitting our maximum encoding capacity at peak times of the day. Why? Because our uploads grew from 200ish videos a day to 1000 videos a day during patch 0.5! I therefore invested some of our STEEM into renting 2 more servers for the encoding, which should triple up our power and hold for a while, maybe.

New Logo

Apparently a lot of people were unable to see the D in the previous DTube logo. A lot of people also started using user made logos. This was going nowhere good :) Here is the new iteration of our logo:

Media Kit

We now provide a media kit for anyone who wants to include a DTube logo in his work. This has been requested so many times on our discord server. If you want to make your own DTube tshirts, mugs, or whatever, you can find PNG and SVG version of our new logo.

We also updated about.d.tube to match our definitive colors and current logo.

Player

The player is where a big part of the magic happens. We decided to patch it early (few days ago), so this part is not really new for active DTube users but I'll still put the changes in here.

Loading Logic

In version 0.2 I changed the loading logic of the videos from using a random gateway, to using a canonical gateway for each file. While this worked really well to reduce the load on all gateways and avoid file being transfered for no reason, it also made a large portion of our videos stop loading when a single ipfs gateway had issues. In this version, the player will now make a HEAD request to every gateway, and find out on which gateway the file is the most available, to you. If a single gateway already has a file available, it will answer faster than others. If multiple gateways already have a file available, most probably the closest geographical one will be the fastest one to answer.

Full custom design

We were using some open source design for our player before, which was actually very close to the official player that the BBC used for a while. @hightouch managed to redesign the whole player into something that fits what we need, with a proper settings menu. At the moment we still only have the playback speed option, but more is coming.

Hotkeys

You should now be able to control the video player more efficiently if you are a keyboard warrior. Space to pause, left and right to go backward / forward, numbers to go to a certain part of a video.

Also mouse users will be happy to know they can now adjust the volume by scrolling the mouse wheel when the player is focused.

Video preview on mouse hover

This wasn't patched earlier because it was too good to reveal ;) and we already had it tested. You can now preview what a video looks like at a certain time without even downloading the video. Wow. Just hover your mouse on the time bar of the video, and the preview will automatically display. This should work for every video uploaded after we released 0.5 so about a month ago.

Optimizing Pictures

DTube's snaps were uploaded straight to IPFS before this patch, and some people were submitting some absurdly high resolution images, considering the fact that these pictures would never get seen at more than 210x118 pixels on DTube. We would also load an insane amount of pictures on some pages like the homepage (12 per line - 60 total for logged in users). We therefore went through with two simple enough changes to drastically improve bandwidth without impacting the on-screen quality.

Lazy Loading Images

What is lazy loading? It's the fact that an element will only load when needed, instead of stupidly on page load. We applied lazy loading to most pictures on DTube. Pictures that are lazy loaded will load with a short fade-in animation.

Manipulating your snaps

On top of that, we will also now resize every uploaded snap through our server to 210x118 pixels resolution (the resolution we use on DTube), minimizing file size. This should also fix snap upload issues.

Content Discovery

A big problem of DTube was how it was pretty hard to find more than the really popular content creators like @exyle, @dollarvigilante, @acidyo or @davidpakman to name a few. Those are lucky to be displayed on the homepage regularly, but it's not the case of the 'lower' 99% of our users. So here are a few things that should help our newer, motivated users to get detected by dolphins/whales.

Curiosity is a very human thing, and if DTube increases the ways in which users can discover content they like, they will naturally spend more time browsing DTube. According to similarweb.com, DTube's users stay for 5 minutes on average, against close to 20 minutes for YouTube. I predict that these changes will increase the time spent on DTube by users a lot.

Dedicated trending / hot / new pages with infinite scrolling

Remember the old trending page we had, which displayed up to 25 videos maximum and was basically useless? We enhanced it to make it load infinitely as many content as you want, by simply scrolling down like on steemit. Then we did the same for the hot and the new videos. This enables you to discover as many content as you want.

Tags browsing

Ah finally! I've been requesting users to enter tags during the upload since 0.1 but it's never been displayed anywhere until today (so for a total of five months).

At least the tag feature is coming in a full pack. Firstly, a short list of the top tags on dtube are now shown at the bottom of the sidebar. Tags are also now displayed under the title of your videos.

Lastly, clicking on these tags will now take you to the tag page where you can discover content from the same tag. On the tag page, you can also filter by upload date and video duration, and sort videos by payout, votes, or upload date.

This will help you easily discover other DTubers matching your interests and start networking with them by giving them votes and comments.

Improved related videos

Of course the related videos should be the main place where content discovery is made. It's the most natural way. We are now using the related feature of the AskSteem API to fetch related videos to the currently viewed one. It's certainly not as good as YouTube's algorithm but it should be a good start. As we get more videos day after day, I'm sure the quality of the related videos will improve by itself.

This should allow you to watch infinitely many videos by simply staying on the video page and watching video after video, instead of being forced of watching always the same content creator like before.

Watch Later

New feature! Ever received a link from someone for a long video but didn't have time to watch it? You can now use the 'Watch Later' option, accessible either through the top-right angle of the snap, or in the little (...) menu under the video.

You can then access these videos at anytime from the sidebar->watch later link. Be careful though if you change device, it won't see the video you added to the watch later on your other device. The data is inside your device, not your account.

Design Changes

Channel Page improved again

We added a default cover image so that it doesn't look ugly. Also added some numbers showing the estimated value of the account (with more detail on mouse hovering), voting power and reputation.

The loading still sucks, and won't show more than your last 100 STEEM contents, so this page still requires some work from us.

Slick Carousel to Owl Carousel

The carousel is the thing that that 'rotates' videos of each category in the homepage. We've been using a pretty slow module and replaced it with a lighter and faster one. Consequently the homepage will load a bit faster. It's still not fast enough by my taste so we might need to have our own carousel to get the homepage rendering faster.

Night Mode

SteemIt did it so why not DTube? Feel free to try out the dark version of DTube by going into the settings and enabling 'Night Mode'.

You can now Login using SteemConnect

A much requested feature! While I personally believe that using the posting key will always be safer, a lot of users are complaning that they cannot login (despite explaining how to retrieve a login key in the #1 question our help page).

SteemConnect is a nice alternative for logging in that is easy and secure. If you try to login on DTube now, there should be a blue SteemConnect button. For your first login on DTube, it will ask for your active key, in order to delegate the posting authority to SteemConnect.

After that, if logged in on SteemConnect, it will log you in automatically by only pressing one button. Your SteemConnect sessions can only stay for up to 7 days, after that you will need to login again.

Getting messages from multiple sources of information doesn't help my daily tasks. I want the Discord server to become the main chat for the DTube community, I believe it works well and has a lot of advanced features that we require. The dtube SteemIt.chat channel will still exist, but we will not be checking it very often, so it is much better to join our discord if you need help or just want to start networking with other DTubers.

Last words

As you can see, we added a lot of pages and features in this version that should make DTube feel much more complete. A lot of promised features have now been delivered, and only a few are left from my original todo list. What's left in it? Basically notifications, subtitles, mobile apps and enabling search-engine crawling, so that google can finally see DTube's content. The search would need some improvement as well.

DTube has grown faster over the last month than it ever did, and seems to be entering snowball mode. More and more people are converting. Every new level of traffic we reach, creates new issues and challenges for our team. I don't know how long we can keep growing at this pace, but within the next month, we will probably start using GPUs (with the NVENC library) to encode videos. This should increase our efficiency a lot and help us scale into hundreds of thousands of videos per day if we ever reach that point.

With the recent rise of the price of STEEM, we should be making enough money from curation and beneficiary rewards to keep growing until we reach a technical limit or a popularity limit. Our team is still working well and next update should come within a month or so again.

As usual, feel free to comment underneath about the changes (especially the logo), let us know if you think something is wrong and you think we should revise it.

I mean i know its like, late, but i do, i use AVS Video Editor, its eaaasy, and really fast, for decent computer, i tried popular edditors, like sony vegas, adobe, and that one AVS is like MS paint, its light and simple, just like i needed. My advice is go to Yout... i mean some Dtube and see what program tutorials seems easy for You, and use that program.

I'm quite new to steemit and d.tube was 1 of the big surprises. I use youtube since a couple years to upload travel and diving compilations but the re encoding is really frustrating. You work for hours to make a video compilation in adobe premiere to see it then being downscaled to 5 Mbps on youtube.
I kept searching in de d.tube faq for the maximum bitrate settings for my uploads and couldn't believe at first that you can upload and watch lossless. The video below is the best example. Worked about 30 hours on it and now I can finally show it to people lossless without needing wetransfer to send it.

Youtube:

D.tube:

Although sometimes I still run into some bugs, the d.tube platform feels very finished considering the 5 months it exist. I'm looking forward to see what 0.7 will bring.

Yes, uploaded 6 video's now from different lengths with high bitrates so the files are large but never had an error or problem. Only ones I had a bug where for some reason the snap I uploaded wasn't used but the snap of a previous video I uploaded was attached. When I upload from work where we have an 100 Mb/sec upload line the video uploads really fast.

I upload from Belgium and I read a lot of servers are located in Western Europe. Maybe that makes a difference in stability and speed.

Those things are too complicated for me but I believe they should put videos of boobs on dtube...and porn.....I also want to use this space to advertise the butchery of my uncle that is called "Alcobia butchery"...They say the meat there is spoiled and is a crap but is just sometimes...sometimes you can eat it......Please upvote my work, not because it's good(because it's not) but because I need the money for wine, drugs and for Gina, that is a girl that works in a street close to mine and she charges 50 euros each time(There is Vanessa, who charges 25, but she has only 1 teeth and she has a moustache

I get that you may be acting a bit comedic here, but have some decency and respect this lady please. At least make your own comment and not a sub-comment on hers so she is forced to read your crude remarks.

I convinced this guy to join dtube.....apart from being my friend, and the best person I know in terms of character, he imitates different voices with no problem he is the first Dtube stand-up comedian.....in spite of having no followers, he got a decent reward just in the first stand-up comedian video.....then, strangely it's reducing while people that only talk about themselves, about how gay they are(nothing against), about how good they are, get crazy rewards...I hope you guys REALLY WATCH THE VIDEOS and don't curate just based on the image, on the viewers of the first day, etc because that can be easily made up......uncommonly on steem, when posts only have videos in the first 7 days, his older posts KEEP HAVING NEW VIEWERS and this is uncommon.....THIS MEANS THE VIEWERS OF 1 VIDEO LIKE IT AND WILL WATCH HIS OTHER VIDEOS.....HIS OLDER VIDEOS HAVE THE SAME VIEWERS AS THE OLDER VIDEOS OF GUYS WITH MUCH MORE FOLLOWERS AND MUCH HIGHER REWARDS.......his videos in the first day get lower views because he still has few followers......I had with him, when we were 18, an amateur comediant group called "Os Duartes"....we used to act in bars......once one of the biggest comediants in Portugal(probably the best) saw the show and INVITED HIM TO BE AN ACTOR ON HIS NATIONAL TV SHOW ON SUNDAYS....AND THIS GUY REFUSED BECAUSE HE WAS SHY AND DIDN'T WANT TO APPEAR ON NATIONAL TV(HOW HUMBLE THIS GUY IS????).....so I agree when he says he is an idiot......to dtube curators I say: Don't curate based on first image or views in the first day....Really WATCH HIS VIDEOS because he is REALLY VERY GOOD....watch the videos and tell me your opinion....other proof this guy is an idiot is because he wants to quit Dtube...don't allow him to do that. (fiz a minha parte)

nah...I have wronged you...this @fromportugal is a other account I have and I use it to compliment myself faking I am other person.......I am just a fool but I need the money for wine and prostitutes(that part is true)

Don't joke man...people think it's true what you say.....I'm disappointed.,....People: What I said is ALL TRUE!!!!!!! Some people dislike you because they hide the good rewards they have on dtube with posts with less rewards...and they don't like the fact you make a video telling it compensates to post on dtube...they don't like competition...it's not because their butthole is a party place that they are good people.

Didnt thought that D-Tube is so amazing! Gonna start our own channel ! So excited! I mean youtube has become too competetive. The D Tube Community is much more relaxed and you dont get invisible in the big crowd i think.

Yes, when I compare with the local file I can't see any difference. Haven't tried with 4K video yet but it should be the same as the source.

Of course it isn't by accident that youtube re encodes video to a lower bitrate. I'm curious if they can keep it up when more en more video's get uploaded en played. Has the IPFS network enough capacity?

Technically Source is whatever the person uploads. So if the person uploaded a 720p 30fps file, then that's what the source is on that video. On the other hand, somebody could upload an 8K 120FPS file.

With youtube monetization down censorship at an all-time high on the site. I honestly feel like DTube, with the right marketing could be the next big video platform. The payment method is amazing. post good content and people can show you that they like it right then and there. Im looking forward to the future. of Steemit and Dtube, and glad to be a part of the community.

Great platform. Just spent some time on it. Easy to use and pretty self explanatory. I don't mind the similarities to other platforms either. There are so many that it's impossible to avoid. Thanks for the post too. I'm not concerned with receiving your up vote, just genuinely enjoy new roads and yours is one I'm gonna travel on!

I found myself just smiling whilst reading this. It seems DTube alone is getting ahead of quite a few cryptocurrency projects I could mention.

My only thought when reading about the nice additions you're making to content discovery is not to get too tied up in the structures made on steemit with the Hot and Trending page. My experience generally with using new steem apps is that I want an app that helps me find what I want, not one that just displays what steem stakeholders want to reward.

How can we thank you enough and, of course, @ned for his huge support!?! The results are more and more amazing while being of a professional look, very attractive to me anyhow. The logo itself is very attractive too and logically follows the same feel, I love it!

All for one and one for all! A monumental THANK YOU for all these valuable updates.

New technology is not easy. The Dtube project has done an amazing job scaling to the speed of their adoption. I have had a little trouble with busy networks but that is to be expected. It is important that we as users are not to critical of developers we need to give good feedback but not degrade people for not having things perfect. too often in the open source community users attack developers who are just trying to help.

Yeah it took YouTube longer to develop features similar to this, but we have the advantage of being late and having 10 years of web development tools accessible, while they had to build everything themselves.

Well, I just uploaded a video to test it out and it is working fantastically. A MASSIVE improvement in such a short amount of time. Not to be discouraging but when DTube first rolled out it was difficult to use and just didn't work for me, but this is brilliant. Officially switching over from Vimeo as my first choice uploader now :) Seriously great work on the updates

Imagine what this platform will be worth when it surpasses YouTube! Google's attempts at censoring literally asked for a platform like Dtube to emerge... When YouTube finally wakes up it will be too late, all the best content will end up at Dtube.

Great improvements. I think content discovery is an area that needs some improvement, not just for dtube but steemit in general. We have got to start thinking of how to give a personalized experience to every user based on their preferences, that way we get people spending more time on the platform. I'm a big fan of your work.

amazing work with all the updates!! I am wondering... Is it possible load an entire feature film up onto dtube? I am in indie filmmaker who has written and directed 7 features. I have one that I have yet to release. I would absolutely love to release it through dtube . if @heimindanger or @ned or someone from @dtube could help me sort this, it would be a dream! I will also join the discord page as well! thanks for making the world a better place!

Yes. You can do it. But make sure to properly encode the file to h264 with aac audio, and don’t make the quality too high. The bigger the file, the more difficulties it can have loading. Splitting into different parts maybe would be an option

thanks for the info! i will look deeper into it! I really wanna keep it as a feature and in the best quality possible. I did shoot the movie with an Android cell phone in London, White Sands New Mexico, and Los Angeles. Here is a link to the trailer if you are interested in checking it out:

Perhaps I wait a bit until the tech gets there... Again thanks for your time and info!

I'm quite happy to see a lot of alternatives to YouTube popping up. You have now have PewTube, BitChute, the now defunct Vidme, and now DTube. I hope that people would stop using the word 'tube though. Because it makes it sound like a copycat of YouTube.

I'll definitely signup for DTube! I like the idea of websites built over the blockchain. This is definitely an improvement. And there's of course a monetary incentive doing so.

Amazing work as always from the DTube team! I see alot of potential in this site, which got me to register a Steemit account in the first place. But can this really be the opposition to YouTube we've been finally looking for? Yet so many questions from this humble follower and I don't think they'll be answered as frequently, but may I make a few suggestions?

As for being an opposition to YouTube, you guys still have a massive beast to fight against, and I would love to see DTube thrive, but my suggestions are that it follows: first off, the option of monetization. I have a few videos I like to upload there with assets that aren't exactly mine, thus credit given, and I don't like to make money off of things I didn't make (obviously), as I tend to share my content freely. I welcome donations of any kind, though honestly I think you deserve these donations more than I do, if DTube itself is going to run on raw horsepower. I understand there are podcasts, and even independent media who make a buck daily by their uploads through both Steemit and DTube.

A second suggestion I may add is privacy. Yeah, yeah I know. I know what you're all thinking, but just hear me out. As much as I love sharing content freely, though I do not intend some content to ALL audiences however, but only for my inner friend circle and what not.

What I want really, is a YouTube from 2008'ish looking style of video uploading site with none of that copyright algorithms stuff, as most of the things I make intend to fall under fair use and what not.

I'm still fairly new to both DTube and Steemit, I have alot to learn about before I consider uploading my videos to DTube and,,, part time career I guess. Well, I would consider it more like a hobby when it comes to Steemit. As for financial sources, I'll be aiming to make content of my own accord, though I haven't really put much thought of how to earn Steem yet.

That being said and aside, I'll be vowing support to DTube. Good luck! :)

This is awesome! i'm literally going to make a post when I get the time on how to minimize your video sizes and optimize the files so you can keep the highest quality but have it upload faster and not take a toll on the servers.

this is FANTASTIC! I love the new logo and the new visibility updates, infinite scrolling, tag searching and related videos. 2018 is going to be a HUGE Year for D-Tube. Im proud to say that my Steemfest2 adventure vlogumentary has just uploaded its FIRST D-TUBE EXCLUSIVE episode! hooray! No more youtube for me, the revolution is happening RIGHT HERE!!!! And some day soon there will be an interview with your good self Mr.Danger :) Keep your eyes peeeeeled ;p

Nice!! The new logo is legit, as the kids these days say, lit! I'm really enjoying looking at it with either the white background or night mode. While I still haven't thought about a good video series to put up, I'm really looking forward to contributing on the Github repo. Awesome update by the way!

Thanks so much for all those amazing features. Am I right in saying you still take 25% ofbthe author rewards because I have To admit that this puts me off uploading by my content as it seems a bit high?

Yes at the moment we are still cashing in 25% beneficiary rewards to the @dtube account. Once we have our SMT it will be 0% for sure. Inbetween, as we scale up like we are, I agree we should lower them or redistribute it in some way. I think making it a default that people can change would be a good compromise, however you need to take into account that we actually give 10% for the storage and 10% for the ask steem api service (search, tag browsing, related videos) and that they need to make money too.

Also you could see it as an investment in the meantime considering we will be distributing some of our SMT tokens to our past users based on the beneficiary rewards paid to @dtube.

The dtube upvotes are so generous I think that this negates the 25% for many of us anyway. With the dtube upvotes, since they are done manually are there better/worse times to be uploading for the team to see and vote for the videos?

Loving the improvement. Hoping for better as we continue to flourish. Released my new band's first single on DTube a few days ago. Not as big response as I was hoping for, but I shall continue to post.
Here it is if anyone wants to have a look :https://d.tube/#!/v/tagsplanet/1mtfp465

A little late on board as I just saw this today. As a music instructor, I will support dtube by uploading my course material workshops on music theory to give high quality educational tutorials here. Thanks for creating this platform @heimindanger